Sixties
Citypresents
a wide-ranging series of
articles on all aspects of the Sixties, penned by the creator of the iconic
60s music paper Mersey
Beat

The
third album by Jimi Hendrix with his original Experience was a million-seller
that topped the American charts and provided him with his only American
chart-topping single, his version of Bob Dylan’s ‘All Along The Watchtower’
(it reached No.5 in Britain) while ‘Crosstown Traffic’ reached No.37 in
the British charts. Incidentally, as a piece of trivia, ‘All Along the Watchtower’
(from the ‘John Wesley Harding’ album) was the only Bob Dylan cover Jimi
ever recorded and, coincidentally, Dylan’s surname can be found in the title
of the album.

The double album has Jimi backed by John 'Mitch' Mitchell on drums and Noel
Redding on bass: the members of the Jimi Hendrix Experience. Additional
musicians were Al Kooper, Stevie Winwood, Jack Cassidy, Buddy Miles, Chris
Wood, Freddie Smith, Mike Finnigan and Larry Faucette. The album, 76 minutes
in length, was recorded in New York and London between June 1967 and June
1968 and issued in America on Reprise on 16th October 1968 and in Britain
on Track Records on 25th October. Jimi penned most of the original material
and Noel Redding composed the track ‘Little Miss Strange’. The live track
‘Voodoo Child’ has Stevie Winwood playing organ and Jack Cassidy of Jefferson
Airplane on bass.
The tracks were: And All The Gods Made Love; (Have You Ever Been To) Electric
Ladyland; Crosstown Traffic; Voodoo Child; Rainy Day, Dream Away; 1983 (A
Merman I Should Turn To Be); Moon, Turn The Tide…Gently, Gently Away; Little
Miss Strange; Long Hot Summer; Come On; Gypsy Eyes; the Burning Of The Midnight
Lamp; Still Raining, Still Dreaming; House Burning Down; All Along The Watchtower;
Voodoo Child (Slight Return).

There were problems at the recording sessions, which caused producer/manager
Chas Chandler to abandon the production and sell his management shares to
Mike Jeffrey. Chas produced ‘Crosstown Traffic’, The Burning Of The Midnight
Lamp’ and ‘All Along the Watchtower’, but wasn’t prepared to continue after
the problems recording ‘Gypsy Eyes’ at the Record Plant in New York. Chas
commented, “Drugs didn’t get in the way of shows, and it didn’t get in the
way of recording, but I thought it was getting in the way of his brain…mainly
acid. It was fu**ing madness”.

The track actually took 41 takes and Chas said: “Jimi would turn up at the
studio with a dozen hangers-on who you’ve never seen before in your life.
You used a sort of shorthand conversation in the studio when there’s nobody
around but when there’s an audience around, people get uptight. It changes
the atmosphere in the studio. He wanted me to go over and over songs, some
things he’d got in the first take. I just couldn’t communicate with him.
I felt like an alien"

. Eric
Burdon was to say, “Would he listen to Chas? No. So Chas got to the point
of like, ‘Oh, I can’t deal with that crazy nigger any more, it’s too much
of a drain on me’ and so the window of opportunity was there for Mike Jeffrey
to walk right in and scoop it all, and I knew that something dodgy was gonna
happen. But I never dreamt it would lead to his death.” The British sleeve of
Electric Ladyland was considered too risqué. Many shops sold the album in
brown paper bags! Hendrix himself disliked the cover and said it detracted
from the music. The record company was happy with the controversy and publicity.
The idea for the cover came from Chris Stamp and David King, art director
of Track Records.

Stamp sent King and photographer David Montgomery to the Speakeasy club
in Margaret Street to get some girls who were offered £5 a head to pose
for the sleeve and £10 if they agreed to pose with their knickers off. One
of the 19 girls, Reimie Sutcliffe, told the music paper Melody Maker, “It
makes us look like a load of old tarts. It’s rotten. Everyone looked great
but the picture makes us look old and tired. We were trying to look too
sexy, but it didn’t work out".

Jimi took one look at the sleeve and said he’d have nothing to do with it.
The cover was replaced with a photograph of Jimi by Reprise in America and
the British gatefold image was also absent from the U.S. release. This was
a photograph taken by David Montgomery during a photo session at the Roundhouse
in London on 16th November 1967 for a Sunday Times feature. When the feature
didn’t appear it was decided to use the image as part of the album package.
Montgomery recalled, “It was actually pretty hairy. We poured a line of
petrol about 15 feet across and we lit it. He was standing in front of it
– he could have had his head blown off. The flames go up about 15 feet high".

Jimi
had wanted a photograph by Linda McCartney to grace the cover and,
when the naked ladies image was used, Linda commented, “I think everybody
thought it was his idea. We did get something in the American cover,
which had an open-out cover. All the photographs inside were black
and white, which I took. They showed him as a human being, rather
than a freak, you know”. The cover photograph of the Reprise album
was by Karl Ferris.

Commenting on the mix for ‘All Along The Watchtower’ Tony Bonglovi,
a Record Plant engineer said, “The song had begun on four-track, progressed
to 12-track and finally 16-track. In the transfer process, the tape
got lost and we ended up doing more than 15 different mixes. Hendrix
would stop the tape, pick up his guitar, or the bass, and go back
out and start re-overdubbing stuff. Recording these new ideas meant
that he would have to erase something. In the weeks prior to the mixing,
we had already recorded a number of overdubs, wiping track after track
– and I don’t mean once or twice – he would overdub the bass and guitar
parts all over, until he was satisfied. He wouldn’t say, ‘I think
I hear it a bit differently".
In May 1968 Chas decided to discontinue working as producer with Jimi,
although he would continue as co-manager. He said. “We didn’t fall
out during the recording of ‘Electric Ladyland’, so much as the sessions
seemed to fall apart out of apathy. In New York, during the recording,I
was spending a lot of time trying to stop the intake of illegal substances.
There were a lot of hangers-on turning up at the studio and any

artist in that situation
is inevitably going top start playing to the gallery instead of to the tape
machine”. Jimi said, “Like ‘House
Burning Down’ we made the guitar sound like it was on fire. It’s constantly
changing dimensions and, up on top, that lead guitar is cutting through
everything”. Noel Redding said “It got to the point in New York when I told
him he was a stupid cu*t. He depended too much on himself as writer, producer
and musician. He was always trying to do it his way. There were times when
I used to go to a club between sessions, pull a chick, come back, and he
was still tuning his guitar. Oh, hours it took. We should have worked as
a team, but it didn’t work”.

The ‘Electric Ladyland’
album was released in the States with a different cover than the British one.
On the release, Chas was to comment, “When the album came out and I saw that it
was ‘produced and directed by Jimi Hendrix’, I was pi**ed off. I was especially
surprised to see so much of what I had done was on there, because I know how much
more time they spent at the Record Plant after I had walked off the project. In
all truth, I had expected to see a much different album.” Jimi penned a note:
“We dedicate this album to acoustic and electric woman and man alike, and to the
girl at or from or with the button stone, and Arizona, and Bill of some English
town in England, and well, EVERYBODY.” Another problem also arose when a studio
technician had renamed the album ‘Electric Landlady’. However, a furious Hendrix
noticed the mistake before it went any further. Interestingly enough, Kirsty McColl
was amused by that title and used it herself on her fourth album, issued in 1991.

Bill
Harryattended
the Liverpool College of Art with Stuart Sutcliffe and John Lennon and made
the arrangements for Brian Epstein to visit The Cavern, where he saw The
Beatles for the first time. Bill was a member of 'The Dissenters' and the
founder and editor of 'Mersey Beat', the iconic weekly music newspaper
that documented the early Sixties music scene in the Liverpool area and
is possibly best known for being the first periodical to feature a local
band called 'The Beatles'. He has worked as a high powered publicist, doing
PR for acts such as Suzi Quatro, Free, The Arrows and Hot Chocolate and
has managed press campaigns for record labels such as CBS, EMI, Polydor.
Bill is the critically acclaimed author of a large number of books about
The Beatles and the 60s era including 'The Beatles Who's Who', 'The Best
Years of the Beatles' and the Fab Four's 'Encyclopedia' series. He has appeared
on 'Good Morning America' and has received a Gold Award from the British
Academy of Songwriters, Composers and Authors.